Our guesthouse finally gets guests to house

Last week I had a lunch in a restaurant here in Cotignac and it occurred to me that it was the first time I'd eaten in a French restaurant since we arrived almost three months ago. There's something a bit funny about that. I mean, most foody folks – and I think that Quincy and I might qualify as foody folks – fetishize French cooking, and when they visit France they make a point to eat out. Somehow that just hasn't been our priority. When Quincy (who wasn't even with me at lunch) asked me about my meal afterwards, I used words like "murky" and "fishy" and "sludgy" to describe it. Her reaction suggested that she thought that I'd found the food disappointing, which isn't true at all. I meant those words in the most positive possible way. The food was fine, and it filled me up.

(Hmm, maybe that last sentence disqualifies me as foody folk after all.)

The impetus behind my restaurant meal was the fact that my parents were visiting for a week. The weekend before they arrived, our friend Carol came down from Geneva for a visit. And just before my parents left town, our friend Helen from Seattle arrived. Yep, now that spring has arrived, the onslaught of visitors has begun.

Please don't misunderstand my use of the word "onslaught" (especially if you're among the parade of people who're planning on visiting during the coming months). I assure you that I'm using the word in the most positive possible way.

Also, if you do visit us, I promise that we won't subject you to the same hardships that Carol endured. Carol's visit coincided with a brief stretch of unseasonably cold weather and we hadn't yet discovered how to successfully heat our guesthouse. We've since learned that the guesthouse "radiator" is merely decorative – kind of like having an ugly painting of a clown on your wall. (Or, more to the point: it's kind of like having an ugly sculpture of a radiator on your wall). We've also now located a portable space heater. And it's sunny and warm now too. After Carol, none of our subsequent guests have needed to sleep clothed in multiple layers of fleece jackets and woolen caps. Also, Maddox hasn't vomited on anybody since her visit either.

Of course, if you want something to read when you're here, I suggest you bring your own books. There's French literature on the bookshelves here, but we don't have much in the way of English-language books lying around. Rather than lugging tons of books over from Canada, Quincy and I opted for lighter, more electronic solutions. Quincy's got a Kindle. And I do a lot of reading on-line, a strategy that produces pleasingly haphazard entertainments. (A few days ago, for instance, and without any intention whatsoever to do so, I spent all evening reading about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.). Carol resorted to scrounging a Lemony Snicket book from Jasper's room, and my parents spent their week reading and re-reading Tintin comics.

In addition to Tintin and delicious sludgy restaurant food, I kept my parents intermittently entertained with walks around Cotignac. On one walk I picked a bunch of wild asparagus growing by the roadside and, despite my mom's contention that it'd be coated in dog urine, I served it up for dinner. We also played a lot of table tennis. My dad used to be a ping-pong demon during his undergraduate days – almost 60 years ago – and he seemed to enjoy the opportunity to once again throw down some topspin-heavy forehand smashes. My mom holds her own at the table too, and the mere act of palming a paddle again brought forth a flood of proud recollections her about sporty teenage years. You probably didn't know, for instance, that she had the highest bowling score among all the girls in her gym class.

("Oh that was just on that one day," said my mom when I read that previous sentence out loud to her, "and then that man died" – referring to the fact that news of FDR's death irritatingly overshadowed her moment of gym-class glory. She also suggested that I blog a bit about her high school badminton exploits; but, alas, I've failed to record the details.)

She flew back to the States today. My dad left a couple of days earlier, to attend a meeting in Switzerland. I accompanied him via train to Geneva where, after making sure that he boarded the right train to continue his onward journey to Montreux, I spent the night at Carol's place, before returning home the next day. (It was super warm and cozy in Carol's apartment, by the way, and chockablock with English-language books; I borrowed one for the long ride home). It was a lot of train travel in a short time. But I was happy to hang out with my dad and to make sure he actually made his connections. Although he's traveled in crazy ways in crazy places all his life, this was the first time he'd actually ridden the rails in Europe in over 40 years, so he was feeling a bit clueless and uncertain about the whole thing. My favorite part of the journey occurred when a French train conductor came around to check our tickets. He was wearing a cheap gray suit over a purple turtleneck, and an old-fashioned driving cap of the sort that I associate with golfers of the Ben Hogan era. I nudged my dad to tell him to get his ticket out. "There's the ticket puncher," I said. My dad looked. "He doesn't much look like a ticket puncher," he said, "He looks like the kind of guy who wants to sell you dirty pictures." For reasons that I can't quite explain, I found that hilarious in about six different ways.